So - about every 15 to 20 minutes - my server checks if a new blog entry has been added. And if it has, it uses curl to submit an update to twitter.

Note:

a) If I submit two blog items very quickly in succession, the first one may not be tweeted.

b) There is a time lapse of up to 20 minutes between me blogging and tweeting.

c) My script isn't 'clever' if I include quotes in my subject line

d) I haven't (in this simple example) checked the blog entry to make sure that it's actually been published.

e) An alternative curl that I tried (and worked) using Json was as follows:curl -u wellho:twitterpassword -d status="Trying to Autotweet" http://twitter.com/statuses/update.json

Update - 9th August 2009 - The --basic option no longer works - indeed, tweets using it are simply being lost. Remove the option and carry on as before. I suspect that this change relates to the problems that Twitter have had over the last few days.(written 2009-03-28, updated 2010-06-26)

Associated topics are indexed as below, or enter http://melksh.am/nnnn for individual articles

G911 - Well House Consultants - Search Engine Optimisation[4121] Has your Twitter feed stopped working? Switching to their new API - (2013-06-23)[3746] Google Analytics and the new UK Cookie law - (2012-06-02)[3670] Reading Google Analytics results, based on the relative populations of countries - (2012-03-24)[2748] Monitoring the success and traffic of your web site - (2010-05-01)[2686] Freedom of Information - consideration for web site designers - (2010-03-20)[2562] Tuning the web site for sailing on through this year - (2010-01-03)[2552] Web site traffic - real users, or just noise? - (2009-12-26)[2428] Diluting History - (2009-09-27)[2330] Update - Automatic feeds to Twitter - (2009-08-09)[2324] What search terms FAIL to bring visitors to our site, when they should? - (2009-08-05)[2137] Reaching the right people with your web site - (2009-04-23)[2106] Learning to Twitter / what is Twitter? - (2009-03-28)[2065] Static mirroring through HTTrack, wget and others - (2009-03-03)[2045] Does robots.txt actually work? - (2009-02-16)[2019] Baby Caleb and Fortune City in your web logs? - (2009-01-31)[2000] 2000th article - Remember the background and basics - (2009-01-18)[1984] Site24x7 prowls uninvited - (2009-01-10)[1982] Cooking bodies and URLs - (2009-01-08)[1971] Telling Google which country your business trades in - (2009-01-02)[1969] Search Engines. Getting the right pages seen. - (2009-01-01)[1793] Which country does a search engine think you are located in? - (2008-09-11)[1344] Catching up on indexing our resources - (2007-09-10)[1029] Our search engine placement is dropping. - (2007-01-11)[1015] Search engine placement - long term strategy and success - (2006-12-30)[427] The Melksham train - a button is pushed - (2005-08-28)[165] Implementing an effective site search engine - (2005-01-01)

This is a page archived from The Horse's Mouth at
http://www.wellho.net/horse/ -
the diary and writings of Graham Ellis.
Every attempt was made to provide current information at the time the
page was written, but things do move forward in our business - new software
releases, price changes, new techniques. Please check back via
our main site for current courses,
prices, versions, etc - any mention of a price in "The Horse's Mouth"
cannot be taken as an offer to supply at that price.